A 400-pound gorilla escaped from his enclosure and ran amok in a Rotterdam zoo in Netherlands, on Friday, May 18, 2007, biting one woman, dragging her around, and causing panic among dozens of visitors before he was finally subdued, officials and a witness said.

The Diergaarde Blijdorp zoo was evacuated and the 11-year-old gorilla, named Bokito, was eventually captured in a restaurant within the park, police spokeswoman Yvette de Rave said.

About Loren ColemanLoren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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7 Responses to “Gorilla Escapes”

Loren, I don’t know what it’s like, zoo-wise, in the US, but I’ve always had deeply mixed feelings about the ones we’ve got in the UK.

On the one hand, they allow people to see in the flesh animals they never otherwise would, on the other hand…

When I was about nine or ten, my grandmother took me to this little amusement park type town called Southport, just outside Liverpool.

Amongst other things, it had this little old fashioned style ‘zoo’, and in one cage that was something like six feet high, with a floor about ten foot by four foot, was what was billed as a fully grown black panther.

It paced up and down in this tiny space by basically chasing its tail, but it was still an impressive sight.

Without knowing quite why, I instantly knew this was wrong.

As we drew closer the air grew thick with electricity from the unrelenting tension and anxiety I sensed it felt. Then, for a moment the glassy angry stare in its eye seemed to melt and I found myself looking into the soul of a being not only filled with sorrow and despair, but fear its dementedness had eventually turn into permanent derangement.

Fortunately, that ‘zoo’ was eventually closed down, but my encounter with that creature haunts me to this day.

More recently I went to Chester Zoo, a much larger, far classier place, with my kids and found myself gazing upon a tiger.

Its circular cage was much larger and far higher than the panther’s, but was still only about four or five tigers’ length in diameter.

I didn’t get the same sense of despair coming off it, and it was certainly far better cared for than the panther, but I couldn’t help questioning whether it was right a creature ‘designed’ by Nature to need a minimum living space of hundreds of square miles had been reduced to a matter of a few square yards just so me and my kids could gawk at it.

Safari parks seem infinitely preferable by comparison but alas, thanks to global warming and humanity’s all round general inhumanity to the environment, it seems like even Bigfoot’s only hope of surviving might be to end up in a zoo.

Actually, if we don’t start sorting things out soon, it may well be the only way humanity will survive is if some far more advanced species installs a few of us in one of their homeworlds’ zoos.

The again – going all Charles Fortean – maybe we’re already in such a zoo and all the physical and psychological violence going on in the world is really just people going ‘guerilla’ in an attempt to bust themselves out of cages so invisible they don’t even suspect they’re there.

Wow, Alanborky, I liked that last thought. I’ve had similar experiences at zoos (Oddly enough, with big cats in very small cages too), but most zoos nowadays do try to replicate habitat in some way. For example, at the same zoo I had been appalled at when I was a teen, they now have a tiger pen with a yard and pool bigger than mine.

Working at an aquarium as I did for nearly a decade, I am aware of both sides of this issue, and have had to defend the keeping and showing of animals in captivity on more than one occasion. It is a sensitive issue, particularly in the aquarium trade, where most fish are still wild captured rather than tank-raised. My observation has been this- If people don’t know about them, they won’t care about them. Put simply, the few in captivity help protect the many out in the wild.

Looks like lots of zoos are going to have to rethink their gorilla enclosures. I always knew that one day a primate would be able to figure out how to get across that shallow moat and climb the rock wall. If I can do that, surely a super strong gorilla can.